Crowds: A Moving-Picture of DemocracyLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Crowds; Social problems
Perhaps one has just come from it and one's soul is filled with the
stern, glad singing of a great foundry, of the religious, victorious
praising spirit of man, dipping up steel in mighty spoonfuls--the stuff
the inside of the earth is made of, and flinging it together into a
great network or crust for the planet--into mighty floors or sidewalks
all round the earth for cities to tread on and there comes to seem
something so successful, so manlike, so godlike about it, about the way
these men who do these things do them and do what they set out to do,
that when I find myself suddenly, all in a few minutes on a Sunday
morning, thrown out of this atmosphere into a Christian church, find
myself sitting all still and waiting, with all these good people about
me, and when I find them offering me their religion so gravely, so
hopefully, it all comes to me with a great rush sometimes--comes to me
as out of great deeps of resentment, that religion could possibly be
made in a church to seem something so faint, so beautifully weary, so
dreamy, and as if it were humming softly, absently to itself.
I wonder in the presence of a Christianity like this whether I am a
Christian or not--the quartet choirs, confections, the little, dainty,
faintly sweet sermons--it is as if--no I will not say it....
I have this moment crossed the words out before my eyes. It is as if,
after all, religion, instead of being as I supposed down at the foundry,
the stern and splendid music of man conquering all things for God, were,
after all, some huge, sublime and holy vagueness, as if the service and
the things I saw about me were not hard true realities--as if going to
Church were like sitting in a cloud--some soft musical cloud or floating
island of goodness and drifting and drifting....
* * * * *
Not all churches are alike, but I am speaking of something that must
have happened to many men. I but record this blank space on this page,
as a spiritual fact, as a part of the religious experience of a man
trying to be good.
When this little experience of which the words have to be crossed out
after going to Church--finally settles down, there is still a grim truth
left in it.
The vagueness of the man who is good, who locks himself up in a Church
and says, "Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!" and the vigour and incisiveness of
the man who says nothing about it and who goes out of doors and acts
like a god all the week--these remain with me as a daily and abiding
sense.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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